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Glub, glub, glub…
I can’t really understand why anyone is giving K-19: The Widowmaker a pass. And a whole lot of people are. At least one critic has suggested that it compares favorably with Das Boot, which makes me wonder exactly what that guy was watching. There is not a single element in K-19 that deserves to even be mentioned in the same breath as Das Boot… except maybe the CG… because there was no CG when Das Boot was made. In fact, there is not a single element in K-19 that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Crimson Tide… except for the effort by the production team to make the story as close as possible to that hit, even if history – which this story is “based on” – isn’t a real fit.
K-19 is rotten at the core. I’m not going to explain how until later in the review, after a spoiler warning, because I believe any examination of the Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson characters will be a spoiler…. though I wouldn’t shed a single tear over spilt rotten milk.
But before examining the central – and virtually only – relationship in the picture, a few words on its surface. This is Kathryn Bigalow’s worst effort yet. The tag on Bigalow has long been that she has great visual skills and trouble bringing her stories together. Movies like Point Break and Strange Days are absolutely worth the time of movie lovers because of Bigalow’s work and the work she gets out of her actors even though, in the final analysis, both films fail. I wish I could point to a single great visual moment in the entirety of K-19. There are one or two decent sequences of intensity in the boat, but nothing particularly special or memorable. She chose to use a lot of CG to show the exterior of the ship, but it feels fake and completely superfluous. Never do you get the feel, except from the wads of expositional dialogue, that we are in 1961, in another era of behavior or in a cold war that means anything to a military crew.
Perhaps the most bizarre visual choice is the unrealistic height of corridors inside the submarine. I was fortunate enough to spend a few hours on a real submarine a couple of years ago and at six feet, I was occasionally cramped. The captain of the ship, who was, as I recall, 6’ 3”, told the story of how he had to stay hunched over more often than not and had to find spaces where he could stretch out to his full height. Liam Neeson is 6’ 5” and in the film, always has at least a foot of head room, except when moving though doorways. Come on.
The accents were a big part of the negative buzz on this film from early test screenings and indeed, every accent is different, accents drift in and out mid-sentence and take you out of the Russian mindset of the piece. That said, it was far from my biggest problem with this film. I would have been aware of the problem, but it’s one of those things that people jump on in any film like this. The most clever method I’ve seen in dealing with it in recent years was in Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone, in which everyone in the WWII concentration camp used their real life accents. It took a little getting used to, but it eventually allowed the viewer to focus on the humanity that brings us together as a species and not on the accents that separate us, good or evil.
Okay… time to get into the story and characters…
SPOILERS AHOY!!!
Okay… Liam Neeson is the captain of the K-19, getting ready to be launched as a key element in the cold war. But the boat isn’t ready. The film suggests that the biggest problem is that the government has used inferior materials to build the ship and that much has to be fixed.
Enter Harrison Ford. He is the tough guy captain who is sent in to become the captain ahead of Neeson’s character. He’s brusque and tough and demanding.
So, you have the former captain, who has the love and respect of his crew and the new captain, who is a cranky hard ass who is immediately accused of endangering the ship and the lives of the crew. Black and white… good guy/ bad guy. Boring. Not as boring as the cardboard characters at the Russian politburo, but….
There are such great moments as the good guy Neeson getting upset with the evil Ford for firing the nuclear engineer who is… get this… drunk and passed out on the job!!! Ooooohhhh! That Ford is a tough, mean man! (eyes roll) Guess what other evil he does… when the fire drills go badly, indicating that a real emergency might result in the boat sinking… you know it… he makes them do it again!!!! Boo hiss!!!
As we get to the second act, Ford’s captain takes the crew through a very dangerous maneuver, designed to both get a specific job done and to unite the crew in an unexpected success. And they have the success. But he’s still being attacked as a bad guy by Neeson and his senior crew, murmuring some stuff about him getting the job via personal relationships… which if it was true, was never clarified by the film. Just more piss in Ford’s cider.
Then comes the second half dilemma. (Yes, the story structure is a mess.) They have already achieved the goal that was set up in the beginning of the film. Surprisingly easily, in fact. But now, there is a leak in the nuclear core and the only way to fix it is to send a number of men into the radiation chamber, making them very likely to die. In the process, the nuclear engineer, on his first assignment out of school and linked to Ford’s character because he was the one who replaced the drunk guy, chickens out and doesn’t go into the radiation area. Of course, he isn’t Ford’s boy… he’s just the guy that the military sent. But that’s the ebb and flow of these characters… simple, powerful story trying to be something more commercial.
Third act… radiation is rising. The “good” guys want to get help from nearby Americans, letting the crew get off the ship and survive. “Bad” guy Harrison wants to sink the ship rather than allow the flagship of the Russian sub fleet get into enemy hands. Neeson wants to save his men at any cost. After a public display, Nesson is sent to his quarters for insubordination. This moves the next two officers down, who were already playing a coup, to take control of the ship away from Ford, arresting him and putting Neeson in charge. But, when they bring Neeson back to the bridge, he turns on the mutineers and arrests them.
The clouds part and suddenly, Harrison Ford’s character is a new man. He’s like the bully in a kids movie who gets some candy from the hero and turns over a new leaf. It’s not as though Ford’s character turns based on seeing the camaraderie on the crew and feels like he is one of them. He turns because the script tells him to turn.
But it gets worse. The repair on the nuclear core has failed and the ship could blow any moment. So, Ford wants to sink the ship rather than allow the flagship of the Russian sub fleet get into enemy hands. Sounds familiar? Well, it’s exactly what he wanted to do before. But Neeson tells him, “Ask them… don’t order them.” So he explains his position – the same position as before - and now he’s a good guy and the whole ship can’t wait to follow him to their demise. (To be fair, he adds to his explanation that if the ship explodes, it will destroy the nearby American battle ship, perhaps causing a nuclear attack on the motherland… presumably, this was a part of his consideration throughout the crisis.)
But before Ford kills them all, happily, the bad engineer who chickened out before goes into the radioactive core by himself without telling anyone and does the repair himself, spending double the time in the radiation that anyone else experienced. Ford goes in to get him all by himself, pulling him out without benefit of any protection at all. It feels like a confused version of the end of The Wrath of Khan, in which Spock dies in the radiation chamber, saving the ship. And in the end, when titles tell us that all the men who went into the core ended up dead and that 20 more men died from less direct exposure, the movie forgets the one guy who went in with no protection at all - Harrison Ford’s captain - who lives to be an old man.
So now the ship won’t explode and now Ford wants to save his men… no matter the cost. But he is saved from making the decision to let the men off and to scuttle the ship himself because a Russian sub shows up nearby. But wait! The bad politburo guys back home say that he can’t let his men leave the ship.
So good guy Harrison lets them off anyway… and they get into the other Russian sub. How does that work? The order comes through the other sub to not let the crew of K-19 disembark… and the other Russian sub lets them all come on board. Huh?!?!?!
To sum up - it turns out that Ford’s character is always right. The men were soft. He makes them strong. He wants to sink the ship and kill them all. He’s a bad, bad man. Then, he gets a conscience and does exactly the same things, but asks nicely… and he’s a great guy… a hero.
There is no internal logic in this film that works. There is no great relationship between any of the characters. Depth of character development is replaced by long, dirty close-ups of angry, worried or dying men’s faces.
Then there is the Private Ryan ending… argh.
BOX OFFICE PREVIEW
It looks like another weekend of disappointment at the box office. This is the time of the summer when distribution execs bitch and moan about the crowded marketplace. But this is also the time when you have to wonder, “Crowded with what?”
Last year at this time, the top five pictures on the weekend before “this” weekend grossed about $72 million. This year, they grossed around $84 million. The next five grossed about $30 million last year and about $38 million this year. So, let’s indulge in the false notion that there is a finite amount of money in any given weekend… last year on “this” weekend, Jurassic Park III and America’s Sweethearts opened to a combined $81 million. That’s almost double what the three new releases hitting theaters this weekend are expected to deliver.
You could certainly make the argument that Stuart Little 2 is not the franchise that Jurassic Park is or that Harrison Ford no longer has the box office punch of a Julia Roberts. But the blame for not having a mammoth opening falls directly on the movies and not on the market.
Last year, in the weekend before “this” one, Legally Blonde and The Score opened to right around $20 million apiece… which is right about what the tracking on K-19 and Stu2 has the pair averaging. So the converse is also true… you would expect Stuart Little 2 to be a much bigger hit than a Legally Blonde and you would expect Harrison Ford action movie to be much bigger than a low-key thriller with DeNiro, Edward Norton and Brando.
As always, it’s the movies…
WEEKEND GUESSTIMATES
1. Stuart Little 2 – 3255 venues – new - $28.5 million
2. K-19 – 2828 venues – new – 17.5 million
3. Road to Perdition – off 29 percent - $15.5 million
4. Men In Black 2 – 3641 venues – off 48 percent - $12.7 million
5. Eight Legged Freaks – 2530 venues – new – 11.8 million
6. Reign of Fire – 2629 venues – off 53 percent - $7.3 million
7. Mr. Deeds – 2823 venues – off 42 percent - $6.3 million
8. Halloween: Resurrection – 2094 venues – off 55 percent - $5.5 million
9. Lilo & Stitch – 2127 venues – off 47 percent - $4.2 million
10. Crocodile Hunter – 2525 venues – off 57 percent - $4.1 million
READER OF THE DAY: JO MO BLO writes: “David Arquette has saved my summer. I'm overexaggerating, but damn, how did he get in the one movie this year that screams "SUMMER"? I've seen Spielberg, the MIB, Deeds, Stitch and others, and by far, "Eight Legged Freaks" has made me the happiest. Don't get me wrong, I loved Minority Report and L&S, hated Deeds, despised and already have forgotten about MIB2, am still reeling from Reign of Fire (The movie was great...as a 60 second trailer, wtf is with the blue tunics?), and was blown away by RTP.
But anyway, although this summer is above par compared to those in the past, Eight Legged Freaks is the one movie that I've seen in the last few years that actually makes me think of summer. It's got cheesy acting, a flimsy plot (damn rabbits), explosions, everything I look forward to in the heat of the night, and to top it all off, those SPIDERS!!! I want to commend the people who gave those things voices, they made the movie. I jumped, I laughed, I shrieked; the movie is the most fun I've had this year.
People who hate it need to realize that Tom Hanks isn't coming out of the mines with his tommy gun, that Cruise isn't running after his eyes, and don't look for the disney logo; this movie is pure cheese; no oscars here, just fun, fun, fun, and scarlet johansson (good god, here's another reason to love her besides Ghost World). Anyway, just wanted to give my opinion on a movie I feel is going to be underlooked this summer. Skip the sub movie (if you've seen Das Boat, you've seen the only sub movie you need to), avoid the rat with the clothes, go for Prosperity, Arizona, watch the spiders, and hit the jackpot.”
NOW, MORE MINORITY REPORT DISCUSSION, COMPLETE WITH SPOILERS
MATMAN writes: “One last thing about Minority Report's ending...
While the obvious lead-in is Tim Blake Nelson's line about being "halo-ed" as a dream state and wish fulfillment, etc, I think the key is in the eyeballs.
I've only seen the film once, but when Lara Anderton presumably pick's up John's eyes in Burgess's office and plops them on the organ keyboard in front of Nelson's character, there are 2 eyes in the bag (pretty sure about this, but I'd need to see this again to be sure). Remember, John loses one of them earlier down the drain, and the pre-crime folks would have no way of knowing where to search for it if it ever struck their fancy to find it, right?
I think it's a dream in John's head. I remember walking out being thrilled with the first 3/4 of the film and disappointed that it ended so predictably - until I read someone's opinion that the last 10-15 minutes are all taking place in John's head. And then the clues starting formulating in my noggin, along with some help from outside sources. If we're to believe some of the script reviews, the screenplay originally ended with some onscreen text that the following year there were a hundred or so homicides in D.C.
Sooo.... since it follows to reason that Nelson wouldn't have his halo/dream line unless it were of some importance to what follows (I can't buy that it's just a throwaway line), and there's one more eyeball than there should be (I think!), and missing text at the film's conclusion, it stands to reason that there's much more to Minority Report's ending than just a pat, feel-good warm and fuzzy ending.
Or so I think and hope...”
But SAILING TAKES HIM AWAY counters: “I wonder if any of your readers holding forth on the "dream sequence" theory of Minority Report's last act would care to cite any justification for their belief from the "text" of the film? I mean something besides snippets of dialogue that can be interpreted whatever way you please. If Spielberg explicitly intended this interpretation then he utterly failed to communicate it to his audience (as Scott failed to communicate his thoughts on Deckard to all but the most anal-retentive sci-fi geeks, and that not until the Director's Cut a decade on). Don't you think we should rule out any theory of "what really happened" in a movie if it doesn't come across to at least the 80th percentile of the audience?”
E ME: What about this weekend’s films? Love? Hate? Rate? Do you care about the return of Box Office Guesstimates? And should we rule out any theory about what really happened if it doesn’t come across to the 80th percentile of the audience? (Certainly not on Eyes Wide Shut!)
